To be honest, as someone from the EU, I'd view that as punishment.
A privilege doesn't mean everyone wants it. If I pay for a ticket, it's my privilege to see the next rocky movie, but I'm no more likely to go there than you are to go to the US.
However, there are a lot of people who want to be here that we should keep out, like criminals. We should also not give special privileges to Mexico over China or India or Brazil.
Haha. You seem to be under the assumption that the world envies your country. Maybe the less developed parts...
I don't care whether they envy it or not. I just know they would come here, because if you're a farmer in China it's in your best interest to do so if possible.
This is the basis of civilization. If a billion people came overnight, there would be a billion new jobs because there would be a billion people needing to do things.
You're right as long as there is enough time to fit in. I am not willing to try a giant people-moving experiment larger than the one we already have with Mexico. Let's start with some reasonable limits, check the people that enter, and see how that goes.
If nothing else we couldn't have any social services, because that kind of influx doesn't allow time for the people to be productive enough on average to pay for the services they use. We can only handle so many people showing up at emergency rooms compared to the number of doctors we have. A lot of the people coming here would already have a problem and need the services before they've worked for a single day. Unless 25% of the immigrants are doctors ready to work, the emergency rooms will shut down.
In the US it works now because new people are generally supported by their parents productivity for 18 years until they can be productive themselves. In your example they would come here supported by nobody.
You would find a way. That is what we're fighting against here, that is why we're losing
No, we're losing because we don't really try. The thing is, you're right, some people would find a way. But that's 1 in 100. It would probably take a few difficult attempts, and would be very costly. Some people would make it here, just like some people make it here in shipping crates. But the number would be much, much lower.
I am merely stating that given minimum wage as a socially endorsed mechanism, to turn around and establish a unofficially endorsed exception class is highly questionable.
So you, first, have to stop relating "illegal" with "Mexican".
A very large fraction of the illegal immigrants in the US come from a country with a much smaller fraction of the world's people. Guess which country that is?
If you reduce the illegal Mexican immigration by a factor of 100 by building a fence with good patrols, that will have a major impact. Not only will it reduce illegal Mexican immigration, but it will allow more immigrants from other countries to have a chance (if we let the same total number of immigrants in). That means the Chinese won't choose to come in a shipping container as often, because they'll have a better chance to immigrate legally.
Taxes. Imagine a consumption tax. It doesn't matter how much you make, but how much you spend. That would encourage saving money, the lack of loopholes would make wealthy people pay a fair amount of taxes, and lower taxes on essential goods would limit the tax liability of the poor.
I'd like to subscribe to your literature, please;)
Just a quick addition, a consumption tax shouldn't be a sales tax. It should be, just like you said, a tax on how much you spend in a year. That way you can make it progressive if you want, where people sum up the amount they spend in a year and pay taxes on that. This avoids loopholes where rich people by 1 million of something that's not taxed because some lobbyist wanted it not taxed. The only way to avoid taxes is to reduce the total stuff you buy over the year (and if it's low enough, probably not taxed). That means you save the money, which is good for everyone (more capital and labor, less consumer merchandise and luxury).
The rational(sic) for this is that younger people will take part of their income as training.
That's certainly more rational, but from an economic standpoint it still creates surplus labor. What if you were addicted to drugs from 14-22, and then you want to recover? You might not know anything about being a productive member of society, and maybe you can't create a production of even $5/hr at first. You need to get on your feet, and the only way to do that is a low paying job. No company will hire you because it will lose them money. What do you do?
Oh, for crying out loud. You yourself are a person of "unknown criminal background", too. That was nothing but a racist slur.
I'm not crossing a border and asking to be a part of another society. Most Mexicans aren't criminals, but why not filter out the ones that are before they come in? If I were a criminal, I would either be incarcerated or I would have a felony on my record, which restricts many of my freedoms. If a Mexican criminal comes here, we have no record of their crimes. Immigration to the US is a privilege, and if you're a criminal, we can reject you.
Why are Mexicans given a special privilege over other countries? If you want to immigrate here from China, good luck. But from Mexico? No problem, just keep running in until you stay long enough to have kids here. Legal immigrants give our economy all of the good that illegal immigrants bring but none of the bad that illegal immigrants bring.
... and if you can't get a job at a low pay rate, you have no way to gain the experience necessary to get jobs at higher pay rates. Wealthy people tend to think of experience in terms of education. But sometimes people just need to learn how to interact with a boss, show up on time, and in general learn how to handle the whole idea of a job.
If you say that it's illegal to hire someone for $5/hour, that means you're eliminating that opportunity for them.
And any time you have a price floor, that means you will have a surplus. Any time you have a surplus that also makes discrimination cost nothing, because if two equally qualified people show up for the same job, you can pick the one that's the same color as you. If there was no surplus, you'd have to hire the qualified people or your competitors will.
No, it actually makes our food and housing industries possible.
It's not a question of "possible" versus "impossible" it's a question of current prices versus more expensive prices.
Oh, and remember our agriculture is heavily subsidized. So don't pretend that we couldn't possibly afford to buy a single peach without an illegal worker picking it for us, because we can afford it just by eliminating the subsidies.
In fact, it seems kind of stupid to have these subsidies which encourage farms to overuse fresh water, pollute, and encourage illegal immigration. Farmers say they need the subsidies because otherwise food would be too cheap, and you use it as an argument to say that food would be too expensive without illegal workers!
However, if you were talking about the restaurant industry, that's a different story. It would be significantly more expensive to go out to eat if immigration were reduced.
And we don't have to reduce immigration, we can just enforce our laws and allow the same number of immigrants, but they would be legal immigrants from a variety of countries rather than illegal immigrants of unknown criminal background from Mexico.
and the people who hop the fence illegally just to take advantage of health care
That's not even the real issue. I don't have any problem with the Mexican immigrants, but I do have a problem with our policy. We have laws, and we should enforce them.
(1) We should have some kind of limit on immigration. It might be a very high limit, but there should be a limit because otherwise there would be a billion more people here overnight, and no economy can adapt that many people so quickly. (2) We should have a way to filter out criminals reliably. (3) We should NOT play favorites with Mexico. Those immigrants should get in line and go through the security checks, criminal background checks, and any other filters we have, just like the other immigrants.
A fence and people to watch it solves all of these problems. A good fence. It won't solve the problem 100%, but it will solve it about 99%. Murder is not 100% solved either, but we still enforce when we can.
I won't even consider an Amnesty policy of any kind until the number of illegal Mexican immigrants is cut by a factor of 100. Otherwise they will say "this is the last time we need to do Amnesty, we promise" and then never come through with the enforcement.
PostgreSQL with Slony-I is one of the best replication solutions available. PostgreSQL also has Two-Phase Commit (2PC) in case you need to make synchronous modifications.
These solutions may not be everything to everyone, but they are very useful to a lot of people. Usually people who complain about PostgreSQL replication are people who just want a magic switch without considering what they actually want to happen in the wide range of possible failures that can happen on or between nodes.
This means you can write your queries without thinking about what storage engine you're using and choose your storage engine without having to thinking about how people are going to query it.
That would be cool if it were true. Different MySQL engines affect the behavior of the highest level operations, such as constraints and ACID. Change storage engines and your app may start getting errors where there were none before... or not get errors when it should be.
If you want a real abstraction, check out PostgreSQL's various generalized index APIs, like GiST and GIN. Those allow a lot of flexibility to address the physical locations of the records that you need, without affecting the higher level functions at all except for (hopefully higher) performance. Also look at how much PostgreSQL can do with any index (BTree, GiST, or GIN), for example bitmap scans that fetch from the relation file in disk-sequential order (which is useful for index queries that return a good fraction of the pages in the relation file).
PostgreSQL only has one real "storage engine", but the way indexes can be (and are) used is probably more important. For instance, GIN is great for full text search or array overlap queries, and it didn't require a new storage engine at all.
Here's what gets me about MySQL. They say they have "pluggable" storage engines, but there's no clean abstraction. Each engine supports some things and not others.
Pluggable engines might be useful if the only differences are in the implementation, storage requirements, performance, and other administrative aspects. However, a constraint violation that will cause an error in one storage engine passes right through another storage engine. So, it's not like you can just swap one storage engine for another.
That's not really the way it works with private education now - the good schools choose the students, not the other way around.
That's because of the incentives now -- only people who care very much about education and are wealthy enough to pay tuition are even looking at private schools.
Also, where are all these school choices going to come from?
The vouchers will have the economic effect of reallocating resources from public schools to private schools, if the holder of the voucher so chooses. The new resources allocated to private schools will provide the choice.
When many have problems paying for the costs of raising their child with the help of a government shcool, how are they going to cope if they have to pay all the costs of education?
The government can still subsidize education without creating an education monopoly. Vouchers.
schools would hire more bad teachers, because they are cheaper
There are plenty of high-quality consumer products available that you use every day. Why would you assume the government can do better with education? Remember, everyone gets vouchers, so the parents can spend at least as much on education as they currently do, without it ever constricting their grocery money.
But that's not spending money on the religious goals of the church, it's protecting the citizens, not their religion.
And the vouchers are spending money on the schools ability to teach children objectively. This can be verified by 3rd party examination of some kind, just like they do now. If the religion says that 2 + 2 = 5, the children most likely won't pass, and the school won't get money.
Which then just brings us back to the problems that others were complaining of - government bureaucracy and interference.
Not nearly as bad. The government has a monopoly on education currently. In the voucher system, the hiring, firing, discipline, and everything else would be handled by people who are directly accountable to the parents. All the school has to do is be effective enough to pass objective tests.
Except that the private schools wouldn't be interested in the piddling amount per student that the government would offer. And it ignores things like infrastructure planning and economies of scale.
So, you're saying we need a monopoly because monopolies are more efficient? I don't think so. A school isn't even infrastructure, you can build new ones wherever they're needed without needing to dig up the roads or use eminent domain. Also, the school wouldn't have a choice about how much money to give up when the student left -- that's the whole point. You take the school budget, divide by the number of students, and when one leaves, they take that much money with them.
You should probably consider reading some of the underlying reasons why market economies are more effective in so many situations, and why so many forms of government intervention are ineffective. I recommend "Basic Economics" or "Applied Economics" by Thomas Sowell. Education is important, and in this country the teachers are the bottom of the college graduates, and standards are very low compared to primary education in other places. We need accountability at every level, and the best accountability is a market economy. The WORST accountability is a monopoly.
Think about it this way. What if public schools could compete with eachother for students? It's clear that students would rush toward the good teachers, and the good teachers would try to separate from the bad teachers by moving schools. Now you have a problem: everyone wants to go to the good schools, but there's not enough room. But why is that a problem? Now you can simply leave the good school open, fire everyone at the bad school, and hire new teachers in their place. If you leave the school monopoly in place, the bad teachers will never get fired; it just won't happen. But it needs to.
There may not be a good implementation on a large scale for the costs people are willing to pay, but you'd have to show that some other way.
The thing is, large hierarchies are inefficient. There are many reasons for this, but here are two: (1) Information moves more slowly. In a market, prices unambiguously communicate important information, and prices adapt very quickly to new conditions. In a large hierarchy, if you try to communicate all the intricate relationships with forms, bosses, budgets, etc., you lose a lot of important information, and it moves much more slowly. For instance, in a market, if a resource becomes more scarce, there is an instant rise in the price, which causes more demand for alternative resources, and many ripple effects. The economy is a giant computer, constantly calculating the most efficient use of resources at a given time, and no group smaller than the entire market can calculate as quickly. Generally, in a market, the people making the decision about a transaction have much more information than any 3rd parties. (2) Feedback is much more effective in a market economy. When things start to become inefficient, the market usually corrects that behavior quite quickly. In a hierarchical system, somebody would have devise a more efficient allocation and implement it before the opportunity is gone. A large hierarchy is like steering an aircraft carrier versus a sports car.
Both of these things apply to any large hierarchy. A business can be a large hierarchy, but is usually dwarfed by government, which is often much larger. When you see a business doing something that's obviously inefficient, multiply that by 100 to see why government-run economies are so bad.
Education is no different. Public teachers don't have much feedback when they're doing something wrong, because they don't answer to the people they should be educating. Because the money is forcibly taken from those they are educating, they don't need to bother trying to please those people.
Using vouchers solves many of these problems. You can instantly pull funding from a school if they don't satisfy you, and move it to another school.
Where did you go to school? I am not exaggerating when I say that more than 50% of the teachers at my high school were incompetent and/or lazy. Here's a short list of the kind of teachers that were not fired at my school:
* Take cell phone calls during class * Show up late to class regularly, because it was after lunch * Have poor English * Don't know answers to their own tests * Have no interest in helping students find answers
The problem is not the fact that it's the gummint that runs things. It's just how they run it.
The US is much larger in population than Finland. Social programs tend to work more effectively when the population is smaller.
Also, in the U.S., the incentives are completely broken. There is no incentive at all to be a good teacher, only an incentive to be a teacher for a long time. The NEA is very powerful here, and they have the best interests of teachers in mind, not students. "Job security" means incompetent, lazy teachers never leave.
So, how would the ownership being private make any difference to the quality of education?
Because students would have choice. Not just choice of school, but all kinds of choices within the school. Most parents want their children to be well-educated, even if the parents might not be willing to spend time on their kids themselves. These parents can make demands for better education by voting with their dollars, which works much faster than voting through 5 levels of political indirection.
Probably the biggest immediate result will be that bad teachers will be fired very easily, and good teachers will be in very high demand and get a good salary.
It also raises problems - like government money being spent on schools which might violate separation of Church and State, for example.
The First Amendment does not require that no money is ever spent on anything associated with religion. For instance, police will protect those within a church from violence. Public utilities also serve churches. To interpret the First Amendment to mean that all religious activity is shunned by all levels of government is the opposite of freedom of religion. There would be some kind of standard that would make a school eligible to receive the subsidized money, and as long as the school met that requirement, everything is fine. The school would be forced to teach certain concepts (and be accountable with independent testing, probably) even if the concept might be at odds with some religion or another.
Why not allow public schools to stay open? Then, just allow anyone to take the money allocated to them to a private school instead. I think you'll find the public schools will have little or no demand.
I think that most 'true' hard-core geeks tend to be very liberal, perhaps having something to do with reading/watching Science Fiction stories, as the best of them often emphasize compassion, understanding and attempt to acknowledge society's ills.
If one opposes minimum wage, wouldn't that be compassionate, understanding, and acknowledging society's ills? After all, minimum wage leaves society's youngest and weakest members unemployed. It understands that 10 hours of work at $5/hour might be better than 0 hours of work at $7/hour. It acknowledges that we can't compare society to an ideal (in which everyone has a well-paying job), but only to the alternatives that we have.
Compassion is associated with liberalism because of a feeling. But just because you say you're compassionate, as you reach into someone else's pocket, doesn't mean you are. Often conservatives, particularly economic conservatives, are more interested in incentives and results than feelings.
Just like it "feels" compassionate to take money out of a rich person's bank account and give it to unemployed people. What that really means to an economist is that you're taking labor and capital out of the market (by reducing a bank account balance), and you're allocating it so that unemployed people can use it to consume. The result is that the unemployed person doesn't employ themselves as quickly, and someone else loses their job because there is less money in the market to be used for labor and capital.
You may disagree, and many reasonable people probably do disagree with me. But don't pretend like "compassion" and a desire for the unfortunate to be successful are traits unique to liberals. And most importantly, understanding society's ills is probably the most significant aspect of conservative thought: you don't compare to an ideal, you compare to the alternatives that you have; and you don't accept invisible but huge costs over the masses for small visible benefits for the few.
I would think a libertarian would want to get rid of copyrights altogether and let the markets decided.
There's room for reasonable libertarians to disagree on this issue. Libertarians tend to favor strong civil rights, including strong private property rights. But let's say you write a novel. Are the words property? Is only the book itself property? Somewhere in between?
No, that gets you out of being charged, because you are friends with the DA. Why would a jury be more likely to side with a politician if it actually went to trial?
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To be honest, as someone from the EU, I'd view that as punishment.
A privilege doesn't mean everyone wants it. If I pay for a ticket, it's my privilege to see the next rocky movie, but I'm no more likely to go there than you are to go to the US.
However, there are a lot of people who want to be here that we should keep out, like criminals. We should also not give special privileges to Mexico over China or India or Brazil.
Haha. You seem to be under the assumption that the world envies your country. Maybe the less developed parts...
I don't care whether they envy it or not. I just know they would come here, because if you're a farmer in China it's in your best interest to do so if possible.
This is the basis of civilization. If a billion people came overnight, there would be a billion new jobs because there would be a billion people needing to do things.
You're right as long as there is enough time to fit in. I am not willing to try a giant people-moving experiment larger than the one we already have with Mexico. Let's start with some reasonable limits, check the people that enter, and see how that goes.
If nothing else we couldn't have any social services, because that kind of influx doesn't allow time for the people to be productive enough on average to pay for the services they use. We can only handle so many people showing up at emergency rooms compared to the number of doctors we have. A lot of the people coming here would already have a problem and need the services before they've worked for a single day. Unless 25% of the immigrants are doctors ready to work, the emergency rooms will shut down.
In the US it works now because new people are generally supported by their parents productivity for 18 years until they can be productive themselves. In your example they would come here supported by nobody.
You would find a way. That is what we're fighting against here, that is why we're losing
No, we're losing because we don't really try. The thing is, you're right, some people would find a way. But that's 1 in 100. It would probably take a few difficult attempts, and would be very costly. Some people would make it here, just like some people make it here in shipping crates. But the number would be much, much lower.
I am merely stating that given minimum wage as a socially endorsed mechanism, to turn around and establish a unofficially endorsed exception class is highly questionable.
A fair point.
So you, first, have to stop relating "illegal" with "Mexican".
A very large fraction of the illegal immigrants in the US come from a country with a much smaller fraction of the world's people. Guess which country that is?
If you reduce the illegal Mexican immigration by a factor of 100 by building a fence with good patrols, that will have a major impact. Not only will it reduce illegal Mexican immigration, but it will allow more immigrants from other countries to have a chance (if we let the same total number of immigrants in). That means the Chinese won't choose to come in a shipping container as often, because they'll have a better chance to immigrate legally.
Taxes. Imagine a consumption tax. It doesn't matter how much you make, but how much you spend. That would encourage saving money, the lack of loopholes would make wealthy people pay a fair amount of taxes, and lower taxes on essential goods would limit the tax liability of the poor.
;)
I'd like to subscribe to your literature, please
Just a quick addition, a consumption tax shouldn't be a sales tax. It should be, just like you said, a tax on how much you spend in a year. That way you can make it progressive if you want, where people sum up the amount they spend in a year and pay taxes on that. This avoids loopholes where rich people by 1 million of something that's not taxed because some lobbyist wanted it not taxed. The only way to avoid taxes is to reduce the total stuff you buy over the year (and if it's low enough, probably not taxed). That means you save the money, which is good for everyone (more capital and labor, less consumer merchandise and luxury).
The rational(sic) for this is that younger people will take part of their income as training.
That's certainly more rational, but from an economic standpoint it still creates surplus labor. What if you were addicted to drugs from 14-22, and then you want to recover? You might not know anything about being a productive member of society, and maybe you can't create a production of even $5/hr at first. You need to get on your feet, and the only way to do that is a low paying job. No company will hire you because it will lose them money. What do you do?
Oh, for crying out loud. You yourself are a person of "unknown criminal background", too. That was nothing but a racist slur.
I'm not crossing a border and asking to be a part of another society. Most Mexicans aren't criminals, but why not filter out the ones that are before they come in? If I were a criminal, I would either be incarcerated or I would have a felony on my record, which restricts many of my freedoms. If a Mexican criminal comes here, we have no record of their crimes. Immigration to the US is a privilege, and if you're a criminal, we can reject you.
Why are Mexicans given a special privilege over other countries? If you want to immigrate here from China, good luck. But from Mexico? No problem, just keep running in until you stay long enough to have kids here. Legal immigrants give our economy all of the good that illegal immigrants bring but none of the bad that illegal immigrants bring.
... and if you can't get a job at a low pay rate, you have no way to gain the experience necessary to get jobs at higher pay rates. Wealthy people tend to think of experience in terms of education. But sometimes people just need to learn how to interact with a boss, show up on time, and in general learn how to handle the whole idea of a job.
If you say that it's illegal to hire someone for $5/hour, that means you're eliminating that opportunity for them.
And any time you have a price floor, that means you will have a surplus. Any time you have a surplus that also makes discrimination cost nothing, because if two equally qualified people show up for the same job, you can pick the one that's the same color as you. If there was no surplus, you'd have to hire the qualified people or your competitors will.
No, it actually makes our food and housing industries possible.
It's not a question of "possible" versus "impossible" it's a question of current prices versus more expensive prices.
Oh, and remember our agriculture is heavily subsidized. So don't pretend that we couldn't possibly afford to buy a single peach without an illegal worker picking it for us, because we can afford it just by eliminating the subsidies.
In fact, it seems kind of stupid to have these subsidies which encourage farms to overuse fresh water, pollute, and encourage illegal immigration. Farmers say they need the subsidies because otherwise food would be too cheap, and you use it as an argument to say that food would be too expensive without illegal workers!
However, if you were talking about the restaurant industry, that's a different story. It would be significantly more expensive to go out to eat if immigration were reduced.
And we don't have to reduce immigration, we can just enforce our laws and allow the same number of immigrants, but they would be legal immigrants from a variety of countries rather than illegal immigrants of unknown criminal background from Mexico.
and the people who hop the fence illegally just to take advantage of health care
That's not even the real issue. I don't have any problem with the Mexican immigrants, but I do have a problem with our policy. We have laws, and we should enforce them.
(1) We should have some kind of limit on immigration. It might be a very high limit, but there should be a limit because otherwise there would be a billion more people here overnight, and no economy can adapt that many people so quickly.
(2) We should have a way to filter out criminals reliably.
(3) We should NOT play favorites with Mexico. Those immigrants should get in line and go through the security checks, criminal background checks, and any other filters we have, just like the other immigrants.
A fence and people to watch it solves all of these problems. A good fence. It won't solve the problem 100%, but it will solve it about 99%. Murder is not 100% solved either, but we still enforce when we can.
I won't even consider an Amnesty policy of any kind until the number of illegal Mexican immigrants is cut by a factor of 100. Otherwise they will say "this is the last time we need to do Amnesty, we promise" and then never come through with the enforcement.
PostgreSQL with Slony-I is one of the best replication solutions available. PostgreSQL also has Two-Phase Commit (2PC) in case you need to make synchronous modifications.
These solutions may not be everything to everyone, but they are very useful to a lot of people. Usually people who complain about PostgreSQL replication are people who just want a magic switch without considering what they actually want to happen in the wide range of possible failures that can happen on or between nodes.
This means you can write your queries without thinking about what storage engine you're using and choose your storage engine without having to thinking about how people are going to query it.
That would be cool if it were true. Different MySQL engines affect the behavior of the highest level operations, such as constraints and ACID. Change storage engines and your app may start getting errors where there were none before... or not get errors when it should be.
If you want a real abstraction, check out PostgreSQL's various generalized index APIs, like GiST and GIN. Those allow a lot of flexibility to address the physical locations of the records that you need, without affecting the higher level functions at all except for (hopefully higher) performance. Also look at how much PostgreSQL can do with any index (BTree, GiST, or GIN), for example bitmap scans that fetch from the relation file in disk-sequential order (which is useful for index queries that return a good fraction of the pages in the relation file).
PostgreSQL only has one real "storage engine", but the way indexes can be (and are) used is probably more important. For instance, GIN is great for full text search or array overlap queries, and it didn't require a new storage engine at all.
Note that the GPL applies to the mysql client libraries as well.
This means that, if you want to connect to a mysql server, your client needs to be GPL also.
It doesn't support foreign keys
Here's what gets me about MySQL. They say they have "pluggable" storage engines, but there's no clean abstraction. Each engine supports some things and not others.
Pluggable engines might be useful if the only differences are in the implementation, storage requirements, performance, and other administrative aspects. However, a constraint violation that will cause an error in one storage engine passes right through another storage engine. So, it's not like you can just swap one storage engine for another.
That's not really the way it works with private education now - the good schools choose the students, not the other way around.
That's because of the incentives now -- only people who care very much about education and are wealthy enough to pay tuition are even looking at private schools.
Also, where are all these school choices going to come from?
The vouchers will have the economic effect of reallocating resources from public schools to private schools, if the holder of the voucher so chooses. The new resources allocated to private schools will provide the choice.
When many have problems paying for the costs of raising their child with the help of a government shcool, how are they going to cope if they have to pay all the costs of education?
The government can still subsidize education without creating an education monopoly. Vouchers.
schools would hire more bad teachers, because they are cheaper
There are plenty of high-quality consumer products available that you use every day. Why would you assume the government can do better with education? Remember, everyone gets vouchers, so the parents can spend at least as much on education as they currently do, without it ever constricting their grocery money.
But that's not spending money on the religious goals of the church, it's protecting the citizens, not their religion.
And the vouchers are spending money on the schools ability to teach children objectively. This can be verified by 3rd party examination of some kind, just like they do now. If the religion says that 2 + 2 = 5, the children most likely won't pass, and the school won't get money.
Which then just brings us back to the problems that others were complaining of - government bureaucracy and interference.
Not nearly as bad. The government has a monopoly on education currently. In the voucher system, the hiring, firing, discipline, and everything else would be handled by people who are directly accountable to the parents. All the school has to do is be effective enough to pass objective tests.
Except that the private schools wouldn't be interested in the piddling amount per student that the government would offer. And it ignores things like infrastructure planning and economies of scale.
So, you're saying we need a monopoly because monopolies are more efficient? I don't think so. A school isn't even infrastructure, you can build new ones wherever they're needed without needing to dig up the roads or use eminent domain. Also, the school wouldn't have a choice about how much money to give up when the student left -- that's the whole point. You take the school budget, divide by the number of students, and when one leaves, they take that much money with them.
You should probably consider reading some of the underlying reasons why market economies are more effective in so many situations, and why so many forms of government intervention are ineffective. I recommend "Basic Economics" or "Applied Economics" by Thomas Sowell. Education is important, and in this country the teachers are the bottom of the college graduates, and standards are very low compared to primary education in other places. We need accountability at every level, and the best accountability is a market economy. The WORST accountability is a monopoly.
Think about it this way. What if public schools could compete with eachother for students? It's clear that students would rush toward the good teachers, and the good teachers would try to separate from the bad teachers by moving schools. Now you have a problem: everyone wants to go to the good schools, but there's not enough room. But why is that a problem? Now you can simply leave the good school open, fire everyone at the bad school, and hire new teachers in their place. If you leave the school monopoly in place, the bad teachers will never get fired; it just won't happen. But it needs to.
There may not be a good implementation on a large scale for the costs people are willing to pay, but you'd have to show that some other way.
The thing is, large hierarchies are inefficient. There are many reasons for this, but here are two:
(1) Information moves more slowly. In a market, prices unambiguously communicate important information, and prices adapt very quickly to new conditions. In a large hierarchy, if you try to communicate all the intricate relationships with forms, bosses, budgets, etc., you lose a lot of important information, and it moves much more slowly. For instance, in a market, if a resource becomes more scarce, there is an instant rise in the price, which causes more demand for alternative resources, and many ripple effects. The economy is a giant computer, constantly calculating the most efficient use of resources at a given time, and no group smaller than the entire market can calculate as quickly. Generally, in a market, the people making the decision about a transaction have much more information than any 3rd parties.
(2) Feedback is much more effective in a market economy. When things start to become inefficient, the market usually corrects that behavior quite quickly. In a hierarchical system, somebody would have devise a more efficient allocation and implement it before the opportunity is gone. A large hierarchy is like steering an aircraft carrier versus a sports car.
Both of these things apply to any large hierarchy. A business can be a large hierarchy, but is usually dwarfed by government, which is often much larger. When you see a business doing something that's obviously inefficient, multiply that by 100 to see why government-run economies are so bad.
Education is no different. Public teachers don't have much feedback when they're doing something wrong, because they don't answer to the people they should be educating. Because the money is forcibly taken from those they are educating, they don't need to bother trying to please those people.
Using vouchers solves many of these problems. You can instantly pull funding from a school if they don't satisfy you, and move it to another school.
Where did you go to school? I am not exaggerating when I say that more than 50% of the teachers at my high school were incompetent and/or lazy. Here's a short list of the kind of teachers that were not fired at my school:
* Take cell phone calls during class
* Show up late to class regularly, because it was after lunch
* Have poor English
* Don't know answers to their own tests
* Have no interest in helping students find answers
The problem is not the fact that it's the gummint that runs things. It's just how they run it.
The US is much larger in population than Finland. Social programs tend to work more effectively when the population is smaller.
Also, in the U.S., the incentives are completely broken. There is no incentive at all to be a good teacher, only an incentive to be a teacher for a long time. The NEA is very powerful here, and they have the best interests of teachers in mind, not students. "Job security" means incompetent, lazy teachers never leave.
So, how would the ownership being private make any difference to the quality of education?
Because students would have choice. Not just choice of school, but all kinds of choices within the school. Most parents want their children to be well-educated, even if the parents might not be willing to spend time on their kids themselves. These parents can make demands for better education by voting with their dollars, which works much faster than voting through 5 levels of political indirection.
Probably the biggest immediate result will be that bad teachers will be fired very easily, and good teachers will be in very high demand and get a good salary.
It also raises problems - like government money being spent on schools which might violate separation of Church and State, for example.
The First Amendment does not require that no money is ever spent on anything associated with religion. For instance, police will protect those within a church from violence. Public utilities also serve churches. To interpret the First Amendment to mean that all religious activity is shunned by all levels of government is the opposite of freedom of religion. There would be some kind of standard that would make a school eligible to receive the subsidized money, and as long as the school met that requirement, everything is fine. The school would be forced to teach certain concepts (and be accountable with independent testing, probably) even if the concept might be at odds with some religion or another.
Why not allow public schools to stay open? Then, just allow anyone to take the money allocated to them to a private school instead. I think you'll find the public schools will have little or no demand.
That doesn't back up the statement at all that "only people with money have a decent chance of walking away free".
I think that most 'true' hard-core geeks tend to be very liberal, perhaps having something to do with reading/watching Science Fiction stories, as the best of them often emphasize compassion, understanding and attempt to acknowledge society's ills.
If one opposes minimum wage, wouldn't that be compassionate, understanding, and acknowledging society's ills? After all, minimum wage leaves society's youngest and weakest members unemployed. It understands that 10 hours of work at $5/hour might be better than 0 hours of work at $7/hour. It acknowledges that we can't compare society to an ideal (in which everyone has a well-paying job), but only to the alternatives that we have.
Compassion is associated with liberalism because of a feeling. But just because you say you're compassionate, as you reach into someone else's pocket, doesn't mean you are. Often conservatives, particularly economic conservatives, are more interested in incentives and results than feelings.
Just like it "feels" compassionate to take money out of a rich person's bank account and give it to unemployed people. What that really means to an economist is that you're taking labor and capital out of the market (by reducing a bank account balance), and you're allocating it so that unemployed people can use it to consume. The result is that the unemployed person doesn't employ themselves as quickly, and someone else loses their job because there is less money in the market to be used for labor and capital.
You may disagree, and many reasonable people probably do disagree with me. But don't pretend like "compassion" and a desire for the unfortunate to be successful are traits unique to liberals. And most importantly, understanding society's ills is probably the most significant aspect of conservative thought: you don't compare to an ideal, you compare to the alternatives that you have; and you don't accept invisible but huge costs over the masses for small visible benefits for the few.
I would think a libertarian would want to get rid of copyrights altogether and let the markets decided.
There's room for reasonable libertarians to disagree on this issue. Libertarians tend to favor strong civil rights, including strong private property rights. But let's say you write a novel. Are the words property? Is only the book itself property? Somewhere in between?
The First Amendment was incorporated against the states by the 14th, after the Civil War, unlike the 2nd and parts of the 5th and 7th.
That's the part I don't understand. Why does the 14th bring the right of free speech to individuals, but not the right to bear arms?
have political power
No, that gets you out of being charged, because you are friends with the DA. Why would a jury be more likely to side with a politician if it actually went to trial?